What do end users need?

What the end users (High School Students) need is to learn about the US job landscape in order to define a career path. An interactive Excel dashboard with a map are the means used to fulfill that need.

The Data Set

• US labor statistics by industry & state, from 2017 to 2020
• Dimensions: Year, Industry, State
• Measures: Establishments, Employees, Avg Annual Wage

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Which metrics align with the end user's need?

• Average Wage by Industry
• Average Wage & Employees by Year
• Share of Employees by Industry

Providing all of these different views of the data in a dashboard will help the High School Students (end users) learn about the US job landscape (their need) and make an informed decision on what career path to pursue.

Designing the dasboard

• Filters: Even though all of the fields could be used as filters, the idea is for students to make comparisons with the data across industries. Thus, allowing them to interact with the dashboard and select different industries is the best way to achieve that.
• Visuals: For comparing Average Wage by Industry the Bar chart works best. For Average Wage & Employees by Year the choices are Line and Column charts. Donut chart for Share of Employees by Industry. And a Map to compare metrics across States.
• Layout: the dashboard layout has the intention of focusing the user's attention and guiding them through the elements in a logical sequence. Therefore, it's best to put the title and filters in the top left, and the charts you want them to look at first right below that. This follows the common reading patterns for the end users. It's also important to consider the alignment between the elements, which helps establish a visual order for the user to follow.

Some findings

Say you're a student that's interest in studying Information. It looks like it's the best paid industry with an average salary of 94k/year, although it doesn't look like there is a huge job market (only 2% of Total Employees). The wages have been increasing significantly from 2017 to 2020, even though the number of employees did fall from 2019 to 2020.

Now, what would be the best place to go to college and try to land a starting job with a good salary? Well, let's look at our map by average wages, and it looks like that would be Washington and California. And it looks like the average wages are twice as large as the average for the U.S., which is great.

And if we go back to look at employees per 1000 capita, it looks like there will be opportunities there as well.